Halloween HR Horror Stories – The Results are in!October 29th, 2009 |
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Over 200 HR professionals from a variety of forums participated in the HR Horror Story Contest from Halogen Software earlier this month. This year, HR pros shared their insights into some of the spookiest HR issues around, and many shared their own personal HR Horror Story. Some were funny, while others were downright disturbing! Here’s a summary of the survey results, as well as the winner (and runners up) for the best HR Horror story. Names and places have been omitted to protect those involved – and once you read some of these stories, you’ll definitely see why anonymity is a must!
Happy Halloween from Halogen Software!
Survey Questions and Results
HR Professionals’ Worst Horror Stories
Hundreds of funny, spooky, and downright terrifying horror stories flooded in for this contest. The winner of this year’s contest won a Flip Mino HD Camcorder. Names and places are not included to protect the identities of those involved!
Some of our favorites:
I recently interviewed a 6′5″ 250lb part time cage fighter for a delivery position. We conduct very thorough background checks. In the process, we discovered that the candidate received a probation violation from another state with no mention of the previous crime. There was no other information on his criminal record. We used another background check resource to double check out of curiosity ( I am new to HR and wanted to know the difference between our background check provider and one we were considering using due to cost). I discovered the person was a registered sex offender and the probation violation was because he moved and failed to register. We called up the criminal record vendor that we used initially to complain because that offense is EXACTLY what we were trying to avoid. If we hadn’t double checked…
Anyways, long story short. After that conversation, the vendor reported the sexual conviction to our state police. The candidate got a notification in the mail… which was opened up by his significant other in the presence of his ex… who were in the middle of a custody battle. Long story short… within in 24 hours I had an enraged cage fighter twice my size at my place of employment looking for me… I got to use my de-escalation skills.
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Scariest moment was the time early on when an applicant who wore a t-shirt to his interview that prominently featured an unprintable EXPLETIVE DELETED on the front offered me a $200 cash bribe to halt the interview process then and there and hire him.
Kudos for brass. Many demerits for ethics and judgment.
I didn’t hire my potential future blackmailer, although I did end the interview at that point!
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At my last company, a sales account manager went on a medical leave of absence for several months. He’d been hired before I started working at the company. Several months after he was gone, the accounting department brought to my attention that his company-issued and company-guaranteed credit card was past due by several months in the amount of $25,000. Our policy was to not allow any personal expenses to be charged on the card. When looking at the details of his charges, most were to several liquor stores to the tune of $400-$500 per day, and $2,500 bail paid to a jail in Las Vegas. When I looked in his personnel file, I saw in his background check that he had been convicted of credit card fraud and had done jail time. It’s not that this was overlooked as it was highlighted with a marker. Incredibly this guy had gotten hired anyway and was given a company issued credit card. He was immediately fired. The company took the hit for the $25,000 liquor and bail expenses.
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I was in the process of interviewing for a position and had spent all day asking potential candidates the normal round of questions, one being name three of your biggest strengths and three of your biggest weaknesses, this one candidate looked at me and said: “well I sunbath too much so I am concerned with getting cancer, I tend not to shave as much as I should and end up with too much stubble and my third is that I spend a lot of time looking out of the window wishing I was on the golf course”.
I managed to keep a straight face and reiterate that the weaknesses I was actually looking for are related to the work environment and not personal, could he give me three more?
That candidate made my day, of course they didn’t get the position but they certainly made the whole process that much more enjoyable!
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Some people say that telecommuting and web conferencing has opened up access to an entirely new workforce and new possibilities, and who could argue. But sometimes it opens up far more than we bargain for. Many of our teams have regular web conferencing meetings in which everyone can use our nifty webcam technology to be present virtually. Unfortunately, because web cams are now built directly into your laptop, you can sometimes forget that they are even there. For example, take the case of Richard (not his real name). Richard attended one of his managers regular weekly web conference meetings from home, only he forgot about the camera and the fact that it is automatically enabled when you join a meeting. If he had only been dressed inappropriately, say shorts and a T-shirt, that might have been merely embarrassing and everyone would have had a nice laugh. But Richard didn’t have shorts and a T-shirt on. In fact, he had nothing on. It soon became apparent to the other shocked participants - who unbeknownst to Richard could see everything. When his manager said “Richard, what are you doing!” the world stopped. The fallout was so bad and the story spread so fast that poor Richard had to leave the company and move his family to an entirely new area of the country. Even though this happened some months back, I still don’t think everyone is yet over the shock.
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The Winner:
My previous employer was a manufacturing company of almost 800 employees and we seemed to have a lot of interesting troublemaking employees. Since I had the honor of being the Sexual Harassment Prevention Captain for the plant, those were the ones I dealt with the most. I had two sexual harassment issues in the same week that involved people’s butts (to have one was enough, but two!).
First, I had a male employee who got mad at another male employee who was working on the same line as him. The second employee turned around to ignore the guy that was mad and the guy that was mad leaned over and bit him on the behind. The biter actually tore a small hole in the guy’s pants. This was a grown man with grown children and he felt the need to resolve the conflict by biting the other guy on the rear end???
As if that termination was not bad enough, two days later I had another employee who got mad at his boss. His method of conflict resolution–mooning!!! The guy actually unbuttoned his pants, pulled them down, bent over and (the best part of the story, I think) shook his bare bottom at his boss. His boss thought this was funny–it was another employee who witnessed this who reported it to HR!! Once again, how does a grown man think that exposing your behind at work is acceptable? Not to mention, someone in a supervisor role who also doesn’t seem a problem with this behavior!!
Being Sexual Harassment Prevention Captain for this plant was giving me a ulcer—-I have worked at my new job for almost 9 months and I have no stories from here that involve anyone’s butt! 
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We had a bunch of other great submissions that we’ve posted in their entirety at the Lighter Side of HR Blog for your reading enjoyment!
Tags: employee evaluations, employee performance appraisal, employee performance reviews, Generation Y, goal management, HR, performance management, succession planning, talent managementRelated posts
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